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Friday, November 07, 2008

Help Reduce Poverty with Your Ideas for a Global Contest

Good morning, World Heroes and Heroines!

Are you feeling motivated this morning?

I hope so. I know that I am!

Because of the current global economic issues, I wantedto do something to help poor people. While recentlyreading a book called Crowdsourcing, I was struck by theopportunity to launch a new kind of contest to createbetter solutions for reducing poverty.

Traditionally, online contests have provided a periodof a few months to propose solutions. The best solutionsthen gained prizes and recognition . . . and werepublicized for all to use.

The new idea is to start a contest by publishing someoutstanding solutions and inviting people to proposeimprovements on those solutions. The list of publishedsolutions would be continually updated to reflect thebest solutions received to date.

Entrants would have the opportunity to use parts ofalready proposed solutions for their entries.

In this way, someone might make a small change thatwould provide a large improvement in a fine idea andturn the result into something much better. And thenthe process repeats itself as someone else addsanother valuable small change.

In the contests that were reported, the eventualwinning solutions were approximately 1,000 timesmore effective than the first leading solutions thatwere received.

I am interested in doing something like this bybeginning with the best solutions for eliminatingpoverty that any of my students have generated. Iwould publicize these on all of my blogs and putout a press release about the contest.

What are your thoughts about this kind of contest?

How could it be made better?

How could it be made more interesting to you?

What prizes and recognition do you think shouldbe offered?

How should the winning entries be publicized?

Thank for your consideration of this requestfor help.

I look forward to hearing from you.

You can send me e-mails atsave_more_souls@yahoo.com

If you want to learn more about the 400 Year Project, register for free to read about this work at http://www.fastforward400.com/

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About Me

I'm a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and attended Harvard Business School to study marketing while in law school. I'm a member of the bar in Massachusetts.
I teach graduate courses in entrepreneurship and strategic management on-line at Rushmore University (www.rushmore.edu).
I head a consulting firm (www.mitchellandco.com), that specializes in entrepreneurship, finance and strategy.
I am a co-author of The 2,000 Percent Solution (www.2000percentsolution.com), The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, The Ultimate Competitive Advantage (the most highly praised business book by customer reviewers in its first year), and The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook.
I head a pro bono site for improving world progress (www.fastforward400.com).
I have headed The Billionaire Entrepreneurs' Master Mind (see http://billiondollarbusiness.blogspot.com) since 2006.